ART-PRESENTATION: Maurizio Cattelan-Not Afraid Of Love
Hailed simultaneously as a provocateur, prankster, and tragic poet of our times, Maurizio Cattelan has created some of the most unforgettable images in recent contemporary art. His source materials range widely, from popular culture, history, and organized religion to a meditation on the self that is at once humorous and profound. While bold and irreverent, his work is also deadly serious in its scathing critique of authority and the abuse of power.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Monnaie de Paris Archive
Considered as his post-requiem venture, “Not Afraid of Love” is a unique exhibition by Maurizio Cattelan where an intimate point of view of the artist is discovered through a specific layout and confrontation of his masterpieces. Dramatically different yet complementing from “All”, his previous exhibition at Guggenheim, the Paris event is not exhaustive, rather a quest for meaning within a narrative.“My artworks are less funny than one can think. I have been pigeonholed as a funny artist since the beginning, but I’m much more serious than expected, and I don’t resort to irony as much as my reputation depicted me. Things that maybe seemed a joke before are now taken more seriously”. Whether it is an irreverent portrait, astonishing or sometimes playful caricatures, the first thing one notices in Cattelan’s artworks is the physical emotion that rises in every one of us. The burst of laugh suddenly turns into a sour laughter, and what petrified us at first glance gives us a faint smile the second after. For the Monnaie de Paris exhibition, Cattelan build something new from his existing works, creating surprise, awkwardness and fascination, making it the most interactive exhibition ever conceived by him. Cattelan’s works seizes and exalts the human condition, being an ode to the fragility of human beings, their contradictions, paradoxes, and the projection of their identity crisis. The exhibition will offer its viewers a new perspective on Cattelan’s work. Although an ironic humor threads much of his work, a profound meditation on mortality forms the core of Cattelan’s practice. His recurring use of taxidermy, which presents a state of apparent life premised on actual death, is particularly apt for exploring this thematic concern. Among his most startling projects, is a cycle of lifelike waxworks that portray and contest iconic authority figures. The most incendiary of these works comprise “La Nona Ora” (1999), his notorious sculpture of Pope John Paul II felled by a meteorite, and “Him” (2001), a rendering of Adolf Hitler in the scale of a young boy, kneeling preposterously in a pose of supplication.
Info: Curator: Chiara Parisi, Monnaie de Paris, 11 quai de Conti, Paris, Duration: 21/10/16-8/1/17, Days & Hours: Mon-Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-19:00, Thu 11:00-22:00, www.monnaiedeparis.fr
